20 posts categorized "Beer"

March 27, 2015

My wife is a Marylander and she is obsessed with blue crabs and Old Bay, so we have tried many food items with Old Bay. The typical approach is just to pour a ton of the spice in or on everything, so I was a little skeptical when I heard that Flying Dog was putting out an Old Bay-seasoned beer (Dead Rise Summmer Ale). However, it's really good. It's a nice refreshing ale with just the right hint of Old Bay. Look for it on taps and in the store.

This work is not a product of the United States Government or the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and the author is not doing this work in any governmental capacity. The views expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the United States or the US EPA.

Is Elsevier going with 6 volumes, sans issues, each year? Maybe Elsevier is trying to catch up with the JPE (only 50 more volumes to go!)?

Whatever is going on, we can be sure the changes are designed to increase the price charged to university libraries.

And no, I'm not still angry about having a revise and resubmit, that we thought we had nailed (or nearly so), rejected due to a relatively closed-minded referee who failed to consider an alternative approach and made a number of incorrect assertions in the process of writing the second report. I'll post the rebuttal letter that I wrote to the editor someday (I sent it to the editor after we had resubmitted it to another journal). And no, I'm not still angry.

December 05, 2014

Thanksgiving kicks off holiday party season, and at office holiday parties around the country, this means co-workers will make merry and mischief.

This time of year, Minneapolis attorney Kate Bischoff is a busy woman.

"I often represent clients who are handling the aftermath of a holiday party when it has gone off the rails," Bischoff says. ...

Bischoff says meting out alcohol at parties using vouchers can limit some liability at the office holiday shindig. It also helps to remind employees of basic judgment and rules of conduct. Not that it will necessarily be heeded.

November 17, 2014

Let's have our informal AERE Happy Hour after the Distinguished Guest Lecture ("Life as a Lab: Using Field Experiments in Economics" John List [see note below]) on Saturday. This is a great chance to meet old friends and new and organize your dinner party!

What: AERE Happy Hour

Why: Meet old friends and new and organize your dinner party

Where: Hotel lobby bar (i.e.., Pulse -- "At 5:00 pm, an audible heartbeat will welcome the beginning of an eight-hour social hour as Pulse transforms into a vibrant lounge. As the evening progresses, the bar staff intensifies the showcasing of mixology behind the bar by giving demonstrations on how to make classic and new trendy drinks. The color of the iconic sail will change with the mood of the evening ending with a heightened pulsating array of radiant colors as a salute to the evening.")

When: 6:15 pm

See you in Atlanta!

John W.

Note: Speaking of field experiments, I withdrew my field experiment paper just now. Buy me a beer at happy hour and I'll explain why!

I'll try to post on that note soon (if I can get ready for my other sessions). Here is the excuse that I gave the SEA "We've been waiting on some essential data and it has not arrived." Nor will it ever.

September 19, 2014

As we’ve pointed out before, economics and business journals have few retractions compared with the other academic literature. Opinions vary on why this is, but the fact that only a few journals have plagiarism policies can’t help.

Research Papers in Economics, or RePEc, an organization that maintains a database of economics papers, however, thoroughly investigates accusations of misconduct. A RePEc report, which indicated that the plagiarists were polite enough to cite the original paper, was used in the notice as evidence for a retraction in Economic Modelling.

Here’s the notice for “Retraction notice to “Analysis of nonlinear duopoly game with heterogeneous players”:

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief.

This paper has been removed on the grounds of plagiarism. This case was investigated by the REPEC Plagiarism Committee and plagiarism was confirmed. The complete plagiarism case is described athttp://plagiarism.repec.org/zhang-da-wang.html.

August 30, 2014

... a host of researchers, spurred by the rising cost of telephone polls and plummeting participation rates, are pushing to use a new generation of online-only surveys for their research. This work, which relies on subjects volunteering to be polled, carries great promise of allowing researchers to expand experiments beyond the usual suspects. But it also carries perils. ...

"Right now we don't know if the methods they employ are, or are not, going to have a catastrophic failure," says Robert Santos, chief methodologist at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

"The vast majority of social scientists would say these volunteer polls have no reason to be right," says Robert M. Groves, provost of Georgetown University and a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau. "They have no theory behind them at all."

Such arguments nag at Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University. "There's a reason why people aren't sticking with the old stuff," he says. Every survey now requires massaging data to account for low response rates; the ideal poll no longer exists. Researchers need new methods, he says. "Traditional polls are not so wonderful."

This simmering debate popped into public view this month, when the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the discipline's professional body, sent a letter to The New York Times warning against its recent use of online surveys. The letter was broadly written and seemed to indict the whole discipline of online polls.

Members of the association's email list were soon in a furious internal debate, and Mr. Gelman prominentlycriticized the statement. The association's president, Michael W. Link, regrets some of the language chosen for the letter. It was meant as a caution to the public—especially news outlets—and not as a condemnation of the research, he says. "Maybe the statement could have been a little clearer."

However it was meant, the letter highlighted the curious state in which survey research finds itself. As Mr. Groves has written, if there were a war between our guts and our statistics, the quants have won. Data are the currency of business, government, science, even higher education. There has never been more interest in polling; following Nate Silver, the media have rowed toward data analysis. The truth, if it can be found, simply must be hidden among those numbers.

Yet at this moment of demand, polling is in crisis. The costs have spiraled out of control. The public is harder than ever to reach. Landlines are dwindling, and rare is the person who takes an unknown call on her cellphone. Robocalls and junk polls clog the air. We all want to know what the public thinks—but who has the time to talk?

There is lots of good stuff in the rest of the piece.

I've used data collected by, in order of how much the data costs, Knowledge Networks, Online Survey Solution and SurveyMonkey (who bought Zoomerang). I endorse the first two but won't use SurveyMonkey's panel again (at least for surveys with hypothetical questions, I've presented a telephone vs. mail vs. online panel paper at a couple of conferences that explains why). I'm involved in data collection using the ridiculously cheap Mechanical Turk this summer, but I haven't seen the results yet. I've also heard good things about Survey Sampling's panel.

And today, I'll be in the field supervising an in-person survey of people lined up waiting to get in to the High Country Beer Fest. We have a 5 question postcard survey to pass out where the main question is something like, if the ticket cost $X instead of $40 would you still have shown up today? And in about a week, we hope to survey those who bought their tickets online. I've done a bunch of these tourism event surveys and have always gotten a good response rate.

August 29, 2014

Not so long ago, eating at a vegetarian restaurant could be an ascetic experience even for vegetarians. But all those meat eaters have no idea what they’re missing when they walk past the Laughing Seed Cafe. It distills much that is distinctive about modern Asheville’s charms and quirks to a single place. After the restaurant opened in 1991, it helped lead Asheville’s downtown revival and now highlights a list of eateries that likely give the city the heaviest concentration of vegetarian restaurants per capita on the East Coast. Owners Joan and Joe Eckert also founded the attached Jack of the Wood pub, which brewed Green Man Ales. They sold the brewing business, but still pour its distinctive products in the restaurant and pub. The food has an international turn, with influences on standing menu items that include Vietnamese, Thai, Cuban, Indian, Pakistani, French, Mexican, Jewish, and ingredients assembled in imaginative, clever ways. 40 Wall St, Asheville. 828-252-3445. http://laughingseed.jackofthewood.com

August 01, 2014

In August 1989 the Stroh Brewery Co. was in retreat. The company that had treated employees like family laid off 300 people, one-fifth of its white-collar workforce. “I had to let go four of the five people in the marketing research department. It was heartbreaking,” remembers Ed Benfield, former director of market research at Stroh.

The next month Peter Stroh, who died in 2002, agreed to sell the family business to Coors for $425 million. But Coors got cold feet and pulled out of the deal a few months later. “It had something to do with due diligence, and Bill Coors,” says Benjamin Steinman, longtime editor of newsletter Beer Marketer’s Insights. “There were lots of stories.”

Desperate, Peter Stroh brought in renowned adman Hal Riney to give the Stroh’s brand a more upscale look and position. The cherished Stroh signature gave way to block print, prices were raised, and the 15- and 30-packs were nixed. It could not have been a worse decision. But since the product hadn’t changed, customers could do the math: Sales of Stroh’s-brand beer fell more than 40% in one year, “the biggest drop in sales in the history of beer,” says Benfield.

If you went to college in the 1980s (I was in college from 1981 to 1989) you remember Schaefer, Schlitz and Old Milwaukee. Stroh's owned them all in an attempt to compete with Budweiser and Miller. That didn't work so the final solution is to raise price and reduce quantity, while keeping quality constant. Put that question on your micro exam this fall and see how many college sophomores can predict the outcome. My guess, they'll wonder why the goofy professor put such an easy question on the exam.

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